Explain This One Way Condi!

As Condi travels around Europe her explanation about renditions [strange word to start out with anyway] she sounds more and more like Bill Clinton. "I did not have sex with that woman". It all depends on your definitions - and use of language.

Whatever Condi and her spin-doctors might come up with it will be hard to overcome one very salient matter - this report in the NYT of what happened to a German man snatched up off the street, detained, taken to Afghanistan and then released when the military realised they had made a mistake. Oops! Now there is going to be court case to follow. Watch this space.

Read here how The Independent deals with the US court case - and the background to it.

Meanwhile, another dimension to renditions appears in this interview re-printed in AlterNet.

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Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives? In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t...

Palestinian children in irons. UK to investigate

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Mahler's Prodigal Son

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